The highest that I've verified was around 1850 m if I remember correctly, a couple of years ago with a Picolario. I used to put my Casio altimeter watch in my XC, and it had a max altitude, along with max rate of climb and summation of altitude gained. The highest I recorded with the watch was about 5500 ft AGL, and a typical summation of climbs was in the vicinity of 30,000 feet for a full day of flying. A more interesting point was that I had almost 2 miles of slant range once... The funny thing was on the highest flight with the watch, I knew that I had been considerably higher previously, but hadn't a way to quantify the height. One thing about XC. Back when I used to do a bit more of it, I would try to get out to the flying site a day early so that I could practice. The primary goal of the practice was to get comfortable with flying at extreme altitudes. When you get comfortable, you want to be finding your next thermal at about the height that the stabs disappear. It starts getting hard to fly when the fuselage disappears, and all you are flying is a miniscule little hair line way up there. It is easy to get into heading PIO's at this height due to the lack of orientation feedback. I remember at least once where I accidently had turned the airplane 180 degrees without realizing it (symptoms of "TOO HIGH"). Some day I'll have time to get back to XC and play some more. It is one of the most pure forms of soaring. No launching wars, no stupid spearing of landing spots, just pure flying and soaring.
Joe PS New email is joewurts at sbcglobal dot net. I don't check this one very much anymore (massive spam influx). RCSE-List facilities provided by Model Airplane News. Send "subscribe" and "unsubscribe" requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please note that subscribe and unsubscribe messages must be sent in text only format with MIME turned off. Email sent from web based email such as Hotmail and AOL are generally NOT in text format
